Well, the rendering is now done for “Jose’s Dinner”! Quite an improvement over 25 hours! Thanks to DrQueue, it only took 9 hours and 36 minutes! That is quite impressive! And, it would have been even better if my Windows computer had actually had DrQueue installed. I did a calculation that had me rendering 283 frames on Windows and letting the *nix boxen take care of the rest via DrQueue, but the Windows computer finished a litter earlier than I had expected (partially due to the laptop acting up). So the system wasn’t as efficient overall as it could have been. Could it have been as short as 8 hours? I’ll tell you one thing, though, it certainly is nice being able to have it finish over 9 hours. Instead of leaving it to render over night and waking up with it still going and then still going through work, it can now be done overnight. (At least for this particular animation with its level of complexity) If I can convince some more people to donate their POS computers to me, perhaps I can have myself a mini-Pixar. q;o)

Well, today I finished up all the animation details on “Jose’s Dinner” and set it to render. I’m excited to see how long the render will take. I started it at 1438 today. However, it hasn’t been without hitch. Due, I think, to the wireless card trying to kick in, the laptop rendered for a while then suddenly couldn’t find the network anymore. That cost me about 30 minutes where the laptop wasn’t rendering - so that will skew the stats a bit. q:o(

Another wonderful comic from xkcd:

Ok, so adding in the laptop really improved the render time on the farm. It went from 405 seconds to 260 seconds! So it went from 6.75 minutes to 4.3 minutes!! Now THAT is a dramatic improvement! It basically cut the rendering time in half. So, with this setup, it should take roughly 12 hours to render “Jose’s Dinner”. Not bad compared to 25 hours! I wanted to have one other comptuer participate, but my master died so I had to have that other computer replace the master’s job. I hope it’s just a bad network card. Wed I’m going to open her up and see if I can clean it and reseat the card and see if it will work correctly.

Ok, so on 20 April, I rendered a bouncing ball to see which was faster, Linux or Windows.

Back to Basics: Bouncing Ball from djotaku

In that post, we saw that it took my Linux computer 481 seconds and my Windows computer 453 seconds. So for a slightly longer than one second animation, the windows computer was about 30 seconds faster to finish it. So one might reason that a 2 minute video would finish 1 minute faster and so on as time goes by. So it could become relevant for a long enough animation.

It took me nearly all day, but after consulting one source after another I finally got drqueue to run on my computer. It’s actually very easy to do….if someone actually gives you good directions!

The key to make it work for me was setting up the master and slave .confs and creating the etc, logs, and tmp directory in the same nfs shared folder that I had placed my blend file in. Once I did, it worked like a charm!

For my latest animation, " Jose’s Dinner", I was using Cinelerra for the 2D animatic. I was working on it while I was at my in-law’s house so I was using the laptop. However, we try to use the laptop as little as possible to keep extend the life of the laptop, so when I got back home I wanted to work on it here. However, the files were in different folders than on the laptop. But, since Cinelerra uses XML files, all I had to do was load the file into Emacs and do a find/replace to replace the old folders with the new ones and it worked! With a binary file that would be impossible since the information is not represented as text!

It can be found here, but in case it disappears, I’ve reproduced it.

Zero and her Origin

Zero, the number said to be discovered Nine times by ancient magicians, was Found again by a mysterious order of Nine modern alchemists, who built One machine after another, until finally One exploded with fascinating results. No fire emerged from its Twin engines, but instead Nine small automata crawled out, Denying the proposition that energy, Seven millenia or more in the accumulation, For most purposes, remains Ever constant, throughout the Three ages of man’s civilization.

Well, these guys came up with a survey that tells you which Linux distribution you should use. I took the test and it predicted all the ones I use (Ubuntu, Fedora, and Debian). You should check it out!

This picture:

is now my #1 most viewed photo over this one: